Driving Digital Innovation at Queensland Police: A Conversation with Laura Poidevin

In this interview, Grace Fea, Community Director and Program Producer at Public Sector Network, sits down with Laura Poidevin, Chief Digital Officer at Queensland Police, to discuss the organisation’s digital priorities, successes, and collaborative efforts across government. Laura shares insights into how her team is reducing administrative burdens for frontline officers, embracing AI and automation, and embedding human-centred design to deliver better services for the community.

Grace Fea:
What are the priorities for you at the moment at Queensland Police, particularly in regard to digital and technology.

Laura Poidevin:
My role for Queensland police has been a relatively new role, I've been here for around 18 months. I have two missions that work that through, I'm in charge of looking forward to the future, so what does our digital future look like, and how do we use data into the future better? 

Two main aims - one of those is to make sure that we are supporting our frontline, and we're supporting our frontline police officers while they're supporting the community to be safe and feel safer. That's the primary mission and what we've been working on recently. We are making sure that we really understand what's important to that frontline, their pain-points and some of the issues and their frustrations, as well as opportunities so that we can form the strategy. 

We have six emerging mission statements out of that strategy that we're hoping will come through to help guide us as we move forward in terms of where we want to go and what we look like.

Some of those mission statements are really quite basic in some respects, and some are going to be a lot harder. My secret metric is to try and remove manual administrative burden and paperwork from police officers so that they can get back to doing why they joined up in the first place in keeping the community safe.

So that's one of those key priorities - What's the road map? What do we need to do? How do we do that? Some of the elements that are coming out of there are how do we use AI in that space? How do we automate? How do we use some of the really important work that we have to do to meet our general election commitment and our government priorities? How do we utilise those to make sure we make steps as well as we move forward into the digital space?

There is a lot of service design, redesign, bringing the user into some of those activities to make sure that we're hitting the mark as we build out some of these new products and services. Of course we're doing it in a budget constrained environment, as is most other government departments and jurisdictions at the moment - so I tend to use the word ‘wombling around’ and how do we achieve this within that. I do think innovation through scarcity, and how do you do things when you don't have much, that gives a greater creative feeling around it. 

Don’t miss Laura Poidevin live at the Government Cyber Security Showcase QLD on the 3rd of September 2025. She is part of the steering committee and you can catch her session at 3:25PM in which she will be discussing Delivering on Queensland Police's Digital Ambitions to Enhance Service Delivery and sharing her insights.

Register here. 

View the agenda here.

Grace Fea:
What are some of the successes that you've had so far or even challenges - you mentioned looking at the way you work as well within those budget constraints. Can you talk a bit to those?

Laura Poidevin:
I have this absolutely amazing team within my division - the Digital Innovation team. They're made-up of uniformed police officers who have worked in and across many roles serving our community, but have a massive passion for doing things better and differently.

I've been really fortunate to be able to bring that group of real professionals and outstanding talent together. As a result, we're really getting into helping the organisation with some of its real operational challenges. 

What they're able to do is they go out and understand the problem from a business perspective, look at how the processes can adapt, and how we can use technology in a different way. That tends to be through an application or a power app that allows the user to do what they need to do, but also gives the business a good understanding of the reporting and data which gives us the intelligence about how well we're tracking. 

We have a couple of success stories in that space and part of that was going to inform my talk at the Innovation Showcase.

In the background it's building that bag of intelligence about what works, what doesn't work, and when we pull this lever what does that mean? That's really setting us to the future of what we need and what we need to think about as we move forward. So I'd say that's one of the really big successes. 

Another success is the change of ways of working. We've done a very big user research piece of work right across our stations so that we can understand police officer frustrations and pain-points. Most of the digital strategy work that we're doing, the road map, the initiatives, the thinking of how we prioritise - I can hand on heart say that that's grounded in the reality of our police officers and how we are supporting what they need us to do differently, or the opportunities that they are seeing as we move forward on our digital transformation journey. That set us up as a really strong foundation for how we move forward.

Grace Fea:
Is that similar to the ‘test, learn and grow’ initiative or way of thinking and working that you mentioned?

Laura Poidevin:
I would absolutely say that that digital innovation team almost organically works in that way. We're also seeing that in terms of how we need to approach things like AI and greater automation in how we work. We start small, test a concept, see where that goes, and learn before we grow. I have a lean division, we're quite small in number but we have huge ambitions and most of them stick with ‘Let's just test this to see where this works, and how do we grow from that’.

We've done that across many examples - we might be a little bit behind the eight ball and some of where we're going with the AI, but we're catching up quickly - we did that through a Microsoft Copilot trial, and with Queensland Government where we really saw what worked, what didn't work, our lessons, learnings that we need to do, and beyond that, when we expand further into what we can do through this emerging technology.

Grace Fea:
Just lastly, there's obviously a lot of collaboration going on internally, but what about on the broader scale within the Queensland Government? What's your perspective on collaboration and the importance of that between Departments, and how are you going about that at police?

Laura Poidevin:
I think that's the huge thing - I'm very fortunate to have a lot of colleagues right across Queensland Government that I can reach out to even if it's a ‘hey, I've got an idea, what does that look like’ and they are always willing to offer their time and their advice and so I think that's a real strength of across our digital landscape in Queensland Government. There's a lot of people willing to step in to help support, be the critical friend when you need that. 

Beyond that step, we have constructs through Minister Minikin's area, which is a digital leadership group and a data leadership group. Those are more formal constructs that really help enable those informal things. 

My team are very good at reaching out, particularly in that data space. We've got some really strong networks into the data and AI team over in that Department about where we can go, and what that looks like. We've also seen that we're making, for example, in QPS, some decisions around our enterprise architecture as we move forward and we know that we're not the first department to go through that, we won't be the last one. So again reach out and just test the water and see what people have done and get their lessons and then learnt. 

I think that sharing of information and collaboration of how we all work together is enormous and AI strengthens that. We've also strengthened the human centred design processes - there's not a huge talent pool of expertise, but there are a number of us across Queensland Government that work collaboratively. What we've seen in the budget process means that will be more of the way that we work into the future, and we're ready for it. 

Grace Fea:
 Wonderful, anything final that you'd like to add?

Laura Poidevin:
Oh, Friday afternoon on the spot. I don't know.

Grace Fea:
Very open-ended question.

Laura Poidevin:
I have a picture of a broccoli flavoured ice cream in front of me, which is what one of my team used today to describe why it's so important when we actually go and understand what a user needs are and to make sure that we have fit for purpose. She said, ‘you might have a great idea for a broccoli flavoured ice cream, but would anybody really ever want that?’ Maybe there's somebody out there! But anyway, an interesting thought to end on a Friday!

Don’t miss Laura Poidevin live at the Government Cyber Security Showcase QLD on the 3rd of September 2025. She is part of the steering committee and you can catch her session at 3:25PM in which she will be discussing Delivering on Queensland Police's Digital Ambitions to Enhance Service Delivery and sharing her insights.

Register here. 

View the agenda here.